“We’ll have lots of fun down there. Cap’n Abinadab Cope is just the nicest old man you ever saw!” declared Heavy. “And he can tell the most thrilling stories of wrecks along the coast. And there’s the station ‘day book’ that records everything they do, from the number of pounds of coal and gallons of kerosene used each day, to how they save whole shiploads of people––”
“Let’s ask him to save a shipload for our especial benefit,” laughed Madge. “I suppose there’s only one wreck in fifteen or twenty years, hereabout.”
“Nothing of the kind! Sometimes there are a dozen in one winter. And lots of times the surfmen go off in a boat and save ships from being wrecked. In a fog, you know. Ships get lost in a fog sometimes, just as folks get lost in a forest––”
“Or in a blizzard,” cried Helen, with a lively remembrance of their last winter’s experience at Snow Camp.
“Nothing like that will happen here, you know,” said Ruth, laughing. “Heavy promised that we shouldn’t be lost in a snowstorm at Lighthouse Point.”
“But hear the sea roar!” murmured Mary Cox. “Oh! look at the waves!”
They had now come to where they could see the surf breaking over a ledge, or reef, off the shore some half-mile. The breakers piled up as high–seemingly–as a tall house; and when they burst upon the rock they completely hid it for the time.
“Did you ever see such a sight!” cried Madge. “‘The sea in its might’!”
The gusts of rain came more plentifully as they rode on, and so rough did the wind become, the girls were rather glad when the wagons drove in at the gateway of the Stone place.
Immediately around the house the owner had coaxed some grass to grow–at an expense, so Jennie said, of about “a dollar a blade.” But everywhere else was the sand–cream-colored, yellow, gray and drab, or slate where the water washed over it and left it glistening.